Not trying to rub salt in anyone's wound here, but I was sitting with my girlfriend and watching a newsfeed. It seems pretty much all houses in the path of the tornado are built with wood. I live in Northern Europe and we are used to some weather as well (no big tornadoes though). All our homes and buildings are built either with clay bricks or concrete - to offer proper shelter in e.g. a hurricane, and to keep heat inside during cold winters.

I just wonder, why on Earth would you build this many obviously vulnerable wooden homes in an area infamous for its rough weather? Haven't you guys ever heard of The Three Little Pigs?

jimmyjackfunk:reillan: SlothB77: A family of four died hiding in a freezer? Dont take your tornado safety advice from indiana jones movies.

nice. It was a walk-in freezer, and normally those things survive tornadoes. this is not a normal tornado.

I keep mentioning the one in 2011 that hit us. The manager of the little c-store (likeable guy) seen it coming and went outside rushing customers inside to the walkin. That guy gets all my business now even if his store was on the other side of town. Back in '10 the one that hit the Loves on I40 and Choctaw the assistant manager went outside to rush people in and he ended up getting hit by debris

Yeah, a friend of my dad's was at the one in Catoosa back in 93, and rushed to help people affected after the building collapsed. It wasn't until he finally sat down hours later that the bleeding in his brain took him (no one had even known he had been hit by any debris).

Rare, but yep, they happen. Coriolis force tends to give hurricanes the spin directions you'd normally associate with the hemisphere "rule", but tornadoes occur on too small a scale to be affected much by it. Wind shear's the main factor there.

Bippal:I live not far from Henyrville In, my grandfather lives there. The elementary school was destroyed, most of the town as well. It's not nearly as big, and they are just now getting rebuilt. I can only imagine how long this will take to get back going. My fiancee is pregnant with baby number three and had to go to bed early tonight. We had to shut the TV off :(

Not to stroll off topic, but it took three kids before you put a ring on it?

I was just checking to see what the warnings/watches were for my area, and as I was reading the NWS statement, I realized that I was reading it in that computerized voice you hear on the radio whenever something happens. It's kinda creepy.

I'm visiting a friend in Dallas in a few days. and while it's an entirely different magnitude of stuff, this scared me quite a bit. Same "checking the weather-radar every 2 minutes sort of thing." She was ready to bed down in the bathtub once she realized that the sirens had been going on for half an hour and it wasn't a regular North Dallas sort of thing.

I grew up right across from a Nike Missile base and have this cold-war terror built in as regards sirens. I lived through the unreality of that. I've experienced little earthquakes here on the east coast, I've experienced one big earthquake in Asia, I've lived through hurricanes that got their names retired.